Japanese novelist Fuminori Nakamura has won most of the major prizes in Japan and is slowly becoming better known in the English-speaking world. I was recently lucky enough to interview him for The Japan Times about his writing and his new novel in translation, ‘Last Winter, We Parted’. As he is on a book tour of the US, the interview was done via email and entirely in Japanese, testing my language skills to the limit, but I’m pleased with how it came out. You can read it here.
As a follow up I interviewed his translator, Allison Markin Powell, who also translated Hiromi Kawakami’s ‘Strange Weather in Tokyo’ (called ‘The Briefcase’ in the US) which was something of a bestseller and critical success. Hopefully that interview will see the light of day in the not too distant future.
Iain Maloney 